Or will good sense nix the idea of EV’s?
We are led to believe that to save the planet we must all start driving electric cars, I still haven’t climbed on to that particular band wagon yet but going electric does seem inevitable at the moment—despite the fact that there are not enough batteries to go around.
The globe needs a network of battery factories to churn out the much-needed atmosphere saving batteries, not forgetting that most batteries are far more polluting than for the first few years than ICE powered vehicles.
Thus far, the majority of these are being built in China. Sure, there are lots on the drawing board in Europe but most of these are owned by Chinese companies.
By 2030, 69% of all batteries being built will originate in China according to Benchmark, which will be enough to produce a mere 90 million vehicles per year.
In contrast, Europe and the Americas will only have about 14% of the global capacity which will be enough to produce 19 million vehicles annually. And that does of course presume that the current trend of ever bigger cars needing ever bigger batteries does not continue.
China is in the lead simply because its government saw the opportunity earlier and then subsidised the industry massively.
In the past ten years, this has amounted to about USD30 billion in consumer incentives and perhaps as much as USD57billion in tax breaks et al.
These subsidies did create a lot of EV companies but fierce competition and oversupply have driven most of them into the wall and only the select few seem to remain.
European legislatures seem to have woken up with the EU enacting its very own ‘Green-Deal’ Industrial plan The European Green Deal – European Commission (europa.eu) which opens up the way for member states to offer state subsidies of their own to protect local businesses.
The US of Americaland has, and as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA, created a piece of legislation that allows for tax subsidies to buyers of EV’s as long as they do not contain any Chinese or Russian components.
In theory at least, this makes Chinese built or sourced vehicles more expensive. On top of this, US EV battery makers will also receive about USD140 billion in subsidies which is designed to cover about one third of the cost of the battery manufacturer.
I still have a bunch of issues on whether the world is really doing the right thing by going electric. If we are to believe all of the media hype, cars are responsible for 15% of all the carbon dioxide emissions globally, but the world is still well down from its peak of C02 and definitely a lot colder than in it was during the Roman era just 2000 years ago.
But here is the rub: we are using tax payers money to support businesses producing vehicles that, it would seem, are becoming increasingly difficult to sell.
Is it just me or does this seem more than a little crazy?
